


Ship To Wreck

by paperclipbitch



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 18:07:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3819910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A plan that you aren’t willing to change in the middle isn’t a plan worth having, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ship To Wreck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muccamukk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/gifts).



> [Title is a Florence + the Machine song.] This ended up turning into a reflective character study, I hope that's okay. I really enjoyed reading your letter, **muccamukk** , so I hope something in this works for you! 
> 
> Quick warning: there's one brief reference to past non-con, but nothing graphic or detailed.

People didn’t like the hard-faced little girl with the set to her jaw that said she might have been hungry last night, but by _God_ , she was not going to be hungry tonight. They kept their pity for the ragged little girls who cried, trembling lips and dirty curls that untangled might’ve been golden. 

She learned early that the world likes women it can coddle, and pet, and help. It does not tolerate women who want to help themselves, particularly women who will help themselves by any means necessary.

These days, Milady counts her money and curls her hair and saves a shudder of her lower lip for when she knows it will get results; be weak for long enough for a man to underestimate you, and then turn around and break his jaw. There are women like her, of course, who are willing to lie down for years and _years_ , be a mistress, be a wife – though for the latter you must be sure that your lie will hold, for a leaky one ends in a rope and a twist and very little else – and be certain of a future where they may not be themselves, but neither will they starve. In fact, there is no woman that she can think of who has _not_ compromised herself in this way, whether she realises it or not; Milady herself took those steps once, though the memories are brittle when she draws them out, stained and bitter and complicated.

Marriage was not her _intention_ upon seeking out the Comte de la Fere. He was not as handsome as his brother, was not as quick to smile, or to respond to her lowered lids and slyly wicked words, designed to draw him out to her. Athos was, in fact, none of the things that time spent manipulating the nobility had taught her to expect. Her plan had been to seduce him, acquire whatever wealth she could through either gifts or downright theft, and be gone before anyone could start to ask difficult questions or before the very few delights of Fere could begin to pall. It was a reasonable plan, and one she had executed before with both panache and success. And yet Athos seemed immune to her charms, or indeed, those of anyone around him. There was Catherine, beautiful if colourless, fluttering around and trying to attract his attention; she seemed dull enough that perhaps the Comte de la Fere would prefer her company; Milady did briefly consider changing her attentions to the brother, who was younger and more foolish and far more interested in what a well-laced corset could achieve with her breasts.

A plan that you aren’t willing to change in the middle isn’t a plan worth having, after all.

And then, somehow, there was the first time she made Athos laugh; she doesn’t even remember what she said, now, though she is willing to bet that he does, but he let out a low sound of amusement, startling even himself, and the warm flush of triumph she felt had nothing to do with her plan at all.

She should have cut her losses and run then, but she didn’t. She stayed and thought about how a laugh changed Athos’ sombre face into something else entirely, something that was lit from within, something that she wanted to make hers in a way she hadn’t wanted anything that it wasn’t possible to sell on later. Thomas was dull and lascivious in a way she didn’t want to indulge, and Catherine dislike having her fingerholds in Athos dislodged, but Milady stayed and exchanged a little piece of herself for every piece that she gained of Athos.

Too many good women have been lost for love, and Milady was never going to be one of them. She could have been: if she hadn’t been quick, if she hadn’t been smart, if she hadn’t always known to keep a plan even in the depths of happiness, she would have been another corpse cut down from the gallows in the name of love. Love is a mistake, an accident, a hundred tiny scars and the one vivid across her throat. Perhaps it is right that Athos ruined her future; he’d already ruined her past.

Blood has never frightened Milady, and she has never shied away from spilling it either. It is difficult for a woman to maintain a piece of this world, and she will defend hers with whatever is required. Still, killing Thomas was more an act of instinct than anything logical or planned. She tried to point this out later to Athos, babbling hysterical while his face was broken like she’d never seen it and like it would never heal again; why _would_ she ruin this? Why would she take a situation that was working to everyone’s advantage and destroy it on a whim? The fact was that Thomas had her arm and was going to force her, and she has been forced in the past but by _God_ she will not be forced ever again. Not by a man who wore a cheap impression of her husband’s face, with none of the things she loved about it.

Love doesn’t die but it doesn’t feed you either. It doesn’t get you clothes and it doesn’t keep a roof over your head and it doesn’t make people think twice about touching you. Milady grew up, a little girl in a world that strangled little girls, and she learned in those years everything that anyone will ever need to know. It taught her about knives and quick hands and never trusting anything but herself; even when her heart wavered and she found herself with a husband who murmured words of love that sounded as though they’d been wrenched raw and bloody from his own heart, even then she didn’t lay her arms down. She counted and she planned and it was all for naught, in the end, watching Athos leave while the rope around her throat swallowed any words she might have thought about saying. She’s glad, with hindsight; those words belong to no one now, and it’s better that way.

Milady hadn’t climbed all that way only to be thrust back down into those gutters she had burned long ago, and she’d allowed things to grow lax while building fragile dreams that only Athos truly believed could last, but not so lax that she couldn’t shrug back into the skin of the life she’d built before. Separately, fleeing flayed from one another, she and Athos both ended up in Paris. She doesn’t care what he looked like, marriage peeling in tatters from his shoulders, but she knows what she looked like, in her last good dress with her last good leverage and her sights set on Richelieu. Cold and hard and knowing once more, the strings to everyone knotted around her fists like garrotte wires. She had learned a lesson she should have already known, and she would not look back.

Well, perhaps she looks back a little, from time to time; she is human. After all, she could have flung herself into being Richelieu’s mistress, but she didn’t. Romance was one way to move forward in the world, but it was unstable, and if her heart was steel it hadn’t been tempered properly. The world is different – she is different – since her years in Fere, when she thought she could be something that of course she could not, fate would not allow her that peaceful end. She learned and she climbed back up again and she will not make a similar mistake if she can help it; but she will not be sorry. Not even now, after these years of better and worse and something resembling desperation: they cannot make her sorry.


End file.
